You have your bad-habits. Cold-Turkey and moderation haven't worked—here's a third way that does.
Link to Reddit Post (98 comments)
You have your vices.
Mindless Reddit browsing. Impulsive checking of social media. YouTube & streaming TV binges. Video games. Porn. Junk food.
Though they once provided entertainment or a pleasant distraction—and, ok yeah, they still sort of do—these vices are no longer serving you. They cause you to procrastinate. They lead to stress and anxiety; to the guilt and regret you find yourself feeling; perhaps even to the depression, lethargy and apathy that seems to consume you sometimes.
Your vices are simply getting in the way of you living your best life… so you want to stop.
Your reflex is to cut it all out at once. Cold-Turkey.
But that never works. All it takes is an innocent excuse for a taste—and the excuses seem to come so easily and are impossibly persuasive—and that’s it. Bah, you tell yourself, 5 minutes on Reddit, scratch the itch, get it out of my system so I can actually focus, but then the snowball is nudged, and down the hill of amplifying compulsions you go.
As the saying goes, if you give yourself an inch, you’ll take a mile.
Of course there’s weaning down towards moderation. This sounds like the most conventional and sensible approach—nothing too extreme and intense—yet, well, whatever rules and time management systems you set for yourself—controls, schedules, time limits—it all somehow, inevitably, gets ignored or forgotten.
No matter the method you use, from going hard with abstinence, to taking it slow with weaning and moderation, the boundaries you put up tend to soften, slacken, and dissolve. You amend this pact and revise that commitment—always with a perfectly rational excuse. Once you’ve used one excuse or compromise, well, you give yourself permission to use it again and again. The excuses pile up and before long, you’re back to your old ways.
That was me for years and years.
Like you though, the one thing that never wavered was my commitment change. To get better. To get disciplined.
Yet after countless failed attempts, I became frustrated and jaded. Doubtful. I was always confused at what to do and which “school of thought” I should take on for my next attempt.
It just seemed like I had only two choices; two groups of people insisting that their way was the best way.
There was the full abstinence crew—sober and stoic, disciplined and sacrificial—adamant that the only way to freedom and happiness is go Cold-Turkey hard on your vices.
Then there’s the moderation crew—easy-going, warm and inviting— maintaining that life is for the taking, nothing wrong with a little pleasure here and there, and the key is simply finding a path to self-control and balance with the right method or app or whatever.
Both, I’d concede, make good, intelligent points. Both promise contentment and a path to ending procrastination and being more productive.
Yet both never worked.
For others, yeah sure, but for me—and I’m guessing for you too—nothing ever stuck. It's frustrating as heck, right?... but what else is there?
Well… not to get all Morpheus on you, but, what if I told you there was a third way? What if there was a third way out of your rut with your bad habits and into the lifestyle you so desperately crave?1
A what if that third way insisted that the whole “abstinence vs moderation” debate was not even worth having? That it’s a false dichotomy?
The third way says that your behaviors—your actions, habits, compulsions, binges—these are simply the effect of a deeper problem. It’s says that fixating on the means of self-control—on rules and pacts, on streaks and measuring progress, on cold-turkey versus weaning, on abstinence versus moderation—is merely palliative. It’s not the way to permanent resolutions.
The third way says that if you fix the core of the problem, then where you land on how much you consume your vices is where you land.
In other words, how much you end up consuming your vices becomes irrelevant. It’s trivial. It could be “moderation” for some things, and “abstinence” for others—yet by that point, you wouldn’t even be bothered to use labels.
For example, maybe you’d find yourself enjoying 3 or 4 YouTube videos every few days at night, selecting vids on a niche topic you find engaging and useful.
Or maybe, during your free time, you’d care to only be active on the Subreddits that serve, teach and inspire you; that help you reach your goals.
And maybe you’d stop playing mobile games altogether, or you’d stop drinking soda for good, both decisions taken without looking back; without feeling like you’re missing out or that you’re sacrificing something you still love and value, yet is now forbidden because of some pact.
What’s important here is the third way, once implemented, will result in you doing exactly what would lead you to living out your best life.
You get to decide what that is; what’s in and what’s out. Not some book or guru or “school of thought”. You.
Here’s the thing.
Never has humanity had access to such an abundance of knowledge and ideas; never have we been so connected; so empowered to pursue our dreams or make the world a better place. Today’s technology can and should be seen as fundamentally magnificent and overflowing with potential2.
But, like anything else, the problem—and holy-heck-Batman are there problems—comes when this technology is abused. When it’s used for something outside of what it was intended for. When it’s used to distract or relieve away pain and discomfort, instead of communicating, connecting, informing, entertaining.
The real issue here, the one we neglect and push under a rug, is the damn pain… the problem is not the ointment we all use in desperation (our vices). It’s the pain.
Just because a crazy effective ointment has become both incredibly accessible (as in, in our pockets, ready to go 24/7) and socially acceptable beyond any precedent (as opposed to more “traditional” ointments like alcohol and drugs)… doesn’t mean we need to harp even harder on the vices while disregarding the pain they so perfectly pacify.
The war on drugs didn’t work; neither will the war on tech.
And that’s the tragedy here.
We as a society aren’t very good at dealing with pain. I know this, because still, in 2021, my instinct is to hide and mask any mental discomfort or pain I feel. I can’t shake the shame.
But we all have pain. Even if our upbringing wasn’t deprived, traumatic or abusive. Even if we were lucky enough to be born into a stable and secure middle-class existence, there still is the human condition. We’re all cursed with this background refrigerator-hum of anxiety. We’re all troubled by the impermanence of life. We’re all constantly bracing, somewhere in our subconscious if not outright with anxiety symptoms, for impending misfortune, pain, loss, change, suffering. Then there’s the sting of our regrets that our brain likes to taunt us with; and of course, all our outside debts, stresses and worries.
We’re all carrying a lot on our backs. It's heavy, so we’re all tired and in terrible pain, and anxiously bracing for more of it... no matter how much we scramble to deny, ignore or distract and hide it away with our vices.
Pardon my French, but f#ck me, I’ve experienced a lot of pain in my life. Be it in the form of depression, regret, worry, overwhelm, insecurity. I will continue to feel pain, without a doubt, for the rest of my life. I’m thankfully no longer too macho or in denial or ashamed or whatever to pretend otherwise (some of the time, anyway).
And I know you’re experience something similar. It’s time to acknowledge this—otherwise you'll never break free of your rut. And if you are having a hard time with that, some good professional support can be key.
Back to our vices.
Dang.
We’re all so brutally hard on ourselves when it comes to our vices and our willpower failings. Yet, the reality is, from a young age, we simply found coping mechanisms to deal with the whirlwind of troubling emotions, as provoked by the big scary world we found ourselves in. We found effective yet unsustainable ways to survive and deal with the threats coming at us from all directions and the pain that we began to feel as we emerged into adolescence.
We had no choice. We had fuck-all. No-one to guide us or truly care for us. We had no one because our parents had no one, and neither did their parents, nor theirs, and so on.
These became our habits. The impulsive actions we took just to survive. It’s only now, many years later, that they’ve become bad habits. Yet it’s hard to stop—impossible really—because the pain is still there, and millions of years of evolutions has built this compulsion brain system to deal with pain in the quickest way possible. We're hard-wired to reach for our vices on impulse.
So we shouldn’t be mad ourselves, nor at the ointment—it is what it is—we should be mad and concerned about the fricking pain that has driven us, naturally and understandably, for quick relief as kids and now today.
We—mature, ambitious, young adults with our lives ahead of us—simply need newer, better, more constructive, more sustainable ways to cope with pain, discomfort and the threats of our modern world.
This is what is required for that “third way” I wrote about earlier.
It’ll take a bit of work; probably some help too. The process requires you to first figure out a way to manage and control what drives you to your vices in the first place. What leads to your lack of control? What triggers you both overtly and in subtle ways?
Often, it’s sparks of insecurity, discomfort, anxiety, despair. That was the case for me. Other times it’s simply boredom or apathy—a symptom that happens when the connections between our brain’s motivation regions and its newer long-term goal regions have been severed.3 That has been the case for me at least.
When I first wrote this article, I went on at this point to provide five ways I learned to deal with the pain (first of which was to seek someone professional to talk to).
I think however that this thing is already too long, plus, if you found the above ideas to resonate or hit home, perhaps you need a few days to let it sit and process. Maybe, you need to first think of your own ways to break out of your rut, to ease into that third way. Check out part 2 where I’ll be suggesting some solutions—onramps to what I call ‘the third way’.
For now, be well and remember to be compassionate with yourself through your journey to getting disciplined. It's just so key.
Best,
- Simon ㋛
Yep, I’m aware that he never says that line in the movies—and I’ll admit I didn’t know this until I looked it up. Funny how that happens.
Nir Eyal talks this in his book Indistractable. A big tech enthusiast and defender, Nir argues that the popular notion that our modern social media, apps, streaming services etc. are inherently dangerous and ‘addictive’ is untrue and unhelpful. As he says, “time management is pain management”.
More on this in the brilliant book on addiction research, The Biology of Desire by Marc Lewis.